20 Old Hollywood Friendships That Went Beyond The Spotlight

Renowned film actor Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor became close, lifelong platonic friends when they met while filming A Place in the Sun in 1949. On May 12, 1956, after attending a dinner party at her house, Clift crashed his car and was badly injured. Clift’s teeth had been knocked loose and were stuck in his throat, so Taylor climbed inside the wreck and pulled them out so he wouldn’t choke. Taylor also shielded the crash scene from being photographed. She remained with Clift for the rest of his life, until his death in 1966.

Marilyn Monroe had been studying Ella Fitzgerald’s records, and when early 1955 arrived, Fitzgerald was having trouble booking the glamour spots that would advance her career. The Mocambo’s owner wouldn’t book her because he didn’t think she had enough of a glamorous aura to draw crowds. Marilyn called the club owner, promising that she’d show up and make sure he drew a crowd if he booked her. Fitzgerald opened at the Mocambo on March 15, 1955, and it became one of the great stretches of her career.

Buster Keaton, the great silent-film deadpan comedian, began his career working for the comedy king Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. From 1917, Arbuckle was Keaton’s mentor and producer. He was wrongly accused of manslaughter in 1921 when an actress died at a party. A jury exonerated him completely a year later and sent a written apology, but he was blacklisted by movie studios. Keaton stood up for him, provided financial support, and secretly employed him as director of his own films under the pseudonym William Goodrich.

In 1946, Dean Martin, the smooth crooner, and Jerry Lewis, his hyperactive comedic foil, formed the leading comedy team in movies, radio, and on stage. But the stress of fame was too much for them, and after 10 years together, they fought and went their separate ways. For two decades, they did not communicate with each other until their mutual friend, the singer Frank Sinatra, brought Martin onto Lewis’s television show during a benefit telethon.

When Shirley Temple was seven, 20th Century Fox cast her opposite Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, a tap dancer and a former vaudeville star, for 1935’s The Little Colonel. Studio heads weren’t sure if they should let a black man and a white girl hold hands in a film, and so Temple simply grabbed the older man’s hand as they began a choreographed stair dance. It marked the first time that an interracial dancing duo held hands on screen in a big-budget movie.

When Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, ordered William Haines, one of MGM’s biggest stars, in 1933 to enter into a lavender marriage, a sham marriage intended to mask a star’s homosexuality, and leave his lover, Jimmie Shields, Haines refused. He was fired and blacklisted from Hollywood. Joan Crawford came to his defense, publicly supporting him and hiring him as her interior designer, launching his successful second career.

When Audrey Hepburn was looking for a wardrobe for her next film, Sabrina, she met French fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy in Paris in 1953. Although Givenchy created the clothes for the 1954 movie, studio protocol mandated that only the head designer could claim screen and Oscar credit, so he didn’t receive any. Hepburn was livid. She immediately inserted into all future contracts a clause requiring that Givenchy be her designer in each of her films. The relationship lasted 40 years. “It was a marriage of hearts and minds,” said Hepburn.

In 1932, both struggling stage actors, James Stewart and Henry Fonda, met in New York and later shared a home in Brentwood. Stewart was a conservative Republican, and Fonda was a liberal Democrat. In the late 1940s, they had a shouting match over politics that almost destroyed their friendship. They made an agreement not to talk about politics ever again, and the two remained close through the decades, painting pictures and building model airplanes together until Fonda died in 1982.

Charlie Chaplin, who had created “The Little Tramp,” and Douglas Fairbanks, silent cinema’s premier swashbuckling hero, met while crisscrossing the U.S. in 1918 on a tour to sell war bonds. Chafing at being paid so little by the studios and frustrated over having no control over their films, they allied with actress Mary Pickford and director D.W. Griffith to create their own film-distribution outfit, United Artists. It was incorporated on February 5, 1919. Offscreen, Chaplin and Fairbanks remained good friends for many years, playing tennis and taking vacations together as fixtures of Hollywood society.

Two-time Academy Award winner Bette Davis and fellow Academy Award-winning Warner Bros. star Olivia de Havilland first met on the set of 1937’s It’s Love I’m After, and became close friends after discovering they both had feuds with studio head Jack Warner. In 1964, when Joan Crawford bailed on Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, amid her feud with Davis, de Havilland flew in from her home in Paris at Davis’s request to take over the role and save the production.

Stan Laurel, a British comic writer-performer, and Oliver Hardy, famous for his perfect timing in slapstick comedy, were brought together in 1927 by producer Hal Roach. They made more than 100 movies as a team. Onscreen, Hardy played the blustering boss. Offscreen, he let Laurel make all the creative decisions about writing, editing, and production. They had no public spats over money or billing in their 30-year partnership. When Hardy died in 1957, Laurel hung up his hat.

The poised Grace Kelly and the outspoken rebel of MGM’s lot, Ava Gardner, went to Kenya in 1952 to shoot John Ford’s Mogambo. Studio publicists thought they’d clash, with their divergent public personas, but living together in jungle tent camps far from civilization brought them close. They remained friends after Kelly retired to become Princess of Monaco. Gardner became a regular guest at the palace, and they continued exchanging gag gifts, one of which was a brick that Gardner sent Kelly.

When Lauren Bacall arrived in the Belgian Congo in 1951, she was not in the film, just the spouse of actor Humphrey Bogart, who was working with Katharine Hepburn on John Huston’s The African Queen. Bacall endured jungle temperatures, primitive campsites, and bouts of dysentery as a camp nurse and watched Hepburn, a seasoned screen legend, up close and personal. The pair were instant friends. Later, in 1957, Hepburn would help Bacall cope with Bogart’s death.

Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were child students at an acting school in Los Angeles when they met. Both were signed by MGM, which paired them together for ten movies, including the Andy Hardy series. They lived through long working hours, strict diets, and relentless promotional appearances. Rooney called their relationship “forever love” but not romantic. The two remained devoted friends like siblings, helping one another through difficult times right up until Garland’s death in 1969.

Cary Grant, the British-born star of screwball comedies, and Randolph Scott, the action-hero actor in Westerns, met on the set of Hot Saturday in 1932, and, as two burgeoning stars on long-term contracts, rented out a beach house in Santa Monica that they dubbed “Bachelor Hall” to save money. Photos featured in Paramount’s fan magazines showed them cooking and working out together. But when gossip columnists began asking questions, studio bosses sent them off to their own places. Exactly what their relationship was has been disputed by historians, but they were lifelong friends.

In 1914, silent cinema’s most famous actress, Mary Pickford, who was one of the co-founders of United Artists, met Frances Marion, a former journalist, and hired her as an exclusive writer. Their collaborations resulted in such hits as 1917’s The Poor Little Rich Girl. While their partnership furthered Pickford’s status as the biggest box-office draw, it also gave her control over her own films, and Marion became Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriter. Off-camera, they were inseparable, traveling and advocating for women’s creative power in the fledgling film industry.

Marlene Dietrich, the German-born actress and movie star, first encountered Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize-winning writer, in 1934 on board the SS Ile de France, when a seating mix-up left her table with 13 guests, and he stepped in to join them for dinner. They began a 30-year friendship that lasted through letters, in which they addressed one another as “Papa” and “Dearest Kraut,” and traded amusing, witty notes. Hemingway called it a case of “un-synchronized passion,” since whenever one was single, the other was already committed.

Frank Sinatra hadn’t learned to dance before MGM paired him with studio maestro Gene Kelly for Anchors Aweigh (1945). He was clearly nervous dancing alongside Kelly on set, but Kelly set up grueling rehearsals, lasting seven days a week for eight weeks, to help Sinatra hone his moves. It worked, forging one of Hollywood’s most beloved on-screen duos, as well as a friendship that endured for decades.

As a young, ambitious contract player at RKO studio in the mid-1930s, Lucille Ball became the protégé of Carole Lombard, then a reigning queen of the screwball comedy genre. She urged Ball to go for the physicality of lowbrow slapstick, with no glamour attached. Lombard was killed in a 1942 plane crash. Ball considered her an ultimate inspiration. In 1950, when Ball was reluctant to put her film career on the line by attempting a new sitcom, she remembered a vivid dream in which Lombard encouraged her to go for it. Ball said this was what gave her the nerve to do I Love Lucy.

It was while shooting The Maltese Falcon in 1941 that Humphrey Bogart, the quintessential hardboiled film noir star, met Peter Lorre, a Hungarian character actor, and they became friends. The two would co-star in five films, including Casablanca. Along with Lauren Bacall, they also formed what is considered the original Holmby Hills Rat Pack, decades before Frank Sinatra’s legendary Las Vegas Rat Pack. Lorre, a confidant, helped persuade Bogart to marry Bacall. In 1957, he sat by Bogart’s side every day during his final battle with cancer.

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